


Fade

by ignipes



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-23
Updated: 2005-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-02 22:19:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius didn't go to his brother's funeral.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fade

Sirius didn't go to his brother's funeral. He said nothing all day. When the sun was sinking and casting long shadows on the airless summer afternoon, he picked up the keys to the motorbike and said, "Let's go."

Remus went without question. They drove through the streets of London to the magical cemetery in which five generations of Blacks had been buried. Sirius stopped the bike by the gate but did not climb off immediately. Behind him, Remus waited, looking through the wrought-iron fence at the imposing mausoleums and statues filling the well-groomed grounds. The graveyard smelled like late summer and life, like fresh-cut grass and old trees. In a massive oak overhead a flock of birds was chorusing its twilight song.

After a few minutes, Remus felt rather than heard Sirius exhale, and they went into the cemetery. He slowed his pace to follow at a distance, pausing to read the names on the gravestones, looking into the faces of carved angels and weatherworn children, reclining skeletons and solemn saints. Sirius strode ahead without stopping or looking back, his hands tucked in his trouser pockets, his shoulders hunched in his leather jacket.

He finally stopped in front of a stately mausoleum of gleaming white marble. Carved in the stone across the top were the family words: _Toujours Pur_. Remus hung back still, waiting in the shade of an oak, watching. The door to the tomb closed and locked, and there was a single bouquet of red roses on the ground in front of it. Remus tried and failed to think of somebody who would leave flowers for Regulus Black, not presented at the funeral but abandoned by the door, like a secret child.

Sirius stood in front of the closed door for a long time, unmoving. The sun began to set, taking with it the light and heat of the late summer day. Autumn was in the air; Remus could feel it, hear it in the expectant rustle of leaves, taste it in the wind that stirred through the city. The cemetery was heavy with shadows before Sirius turned away. His face was blank, as though carved from stone, and when he stood beside Remus he simply said, "Let's go," and nothing more.

Sirius drove the bike out of London, winding steadily away from the busiest streets, then finally stopped on a the roadside and glanced over his shoulder.

"We're going to fly now," he said.

Remus nodded, leaned forward, and wrapped his arms around Sirius. He held on more tightly than he needed, resting his head on Sirius' back like he used to when they had just learned to fly the bike and they were both worried about falling.

If Sirius noticed, he didn't say anything, and they took off on an empty road and flew north. Sirius flew fast, much faster than normal, and England fell away like a toy model land. The towns and fields and roads sunk into a nighttime patchwork of tiny lights and dark swaths when they were somewhere over Leeds, and the stars winked overhead, motionless and heedless to their hurried flight. Bitterly cold air rushed over them; Remus wasn't dressed for a high-altitude, high-speed nighttime motorbike flight. But he didn't say anything, only huddled closer to Sirius' back, closed his eyes when they began to water.

He wasn't aware of how far they were travelling, so he was surprised to look up, after several hours, and see the ocean sprawling before them and a faint light tinting the northeastern sky.

They swept across the water, heading for the islands that rested like smooth, lazy creatures on the sea. Remus sighed with relief when they descended; his teeth were chattering and he was shivering uncontrollably. Sirius seemed to know exactly where he was going. He set the bike down on a narrow, empty road, then drove on the ground for a while in the predawn darkness, the bike's headlamp casting a pale circle of light across the seemingly empty landscape. They crossed a causeway between two bodies of water and passed a few buildings, Muggle places closed for the night. The rumble of the motorbike was the only sound; it seemed they were the only living things on the narrow strip of land.

Finally, as the sky was blushing pink, Sirius stopped the bike. They climbed off. Sirius glanced at Remus in the darkness, his expression unreadable, and said, "This way. There's something I want to show you."

It was no warmer on the ground. The damp shrubs slapped at Remus' legs, wetting his shoes and trouser cuffs. He followed and said nothing, though, trying not to sniffle too loudly, watching his steps across the uneven field.

When Sirius stopped abruptly, Remus walked right into him, stumbled back. He started to apologise, then broke off.

The standing stones were silhouetted against the brightening sky, jagged and dark, in a broad circle that swept before them. Sirius had stopped just outside the circle, halfway between two of the stones, facing west, away from the rising sun. Remus stood beside him, shivering silently, and waited.

"We came here once, when I was about ten, before I went to Hogwarts," Sirius said, after several minutes of silence. "I don't remember why. Just a holiday, I suppose. A man at the inn told us stories about this place -- gruesome stories, good stories for boys. Our mother disapproved, but we loved it." His voice sounded cold and strangely formal, as though he'd been rehearsing the words in his head throughout the night's drive. "We snuck out of the inn one night, after our parents were asleep, and came down here. We got a little lost on the way, and it was a long walk -- I don't know if the inn is still there, not many wizards holiday here anymore, do they?" Sirius' voice trailed off for a moment, and Remus wondered if he was supposed to answer. Then Sirius continued, "We didn't get here until it was almost dawn. It was raining a little -- we were soaked to the skin, and cold, but we had pockets full of sweets, so we didn't care. It was an adventure."

Sirius fell silent. Birds were singing raucously in the field around them, and colour was seeping into the world, creeping across the land with the light, the shy greens and purples of dawn.

"Of course we didn't get back until after our parents woke up," Sirius said. "Our -- she was furious. That was the end of the holiday. We Floo'd home before lunch."

Remus shifted uncomfortably, trying to convince himself that the rising sun meant warmth. He opened his mouth to speak but didn't know what to say. He hadn't spoken in hours, but it felt like days, this heavy, stifling silence that had settled over them since Alastor Moody had come to the flat to tell Sirius that a Muggle barrister out walking his dog had found Regulus' body. After the storm of disbelief and grief, after one night of raging and crumbling and letting himself break in Remus' arms, Sirius had said almost nothing for the entire week.

Until now. But his voice now, rigid and alien as the stones before them, was almost worse than his silence.

Remus closed his mouth and waited.

"There." The word was barely a breath, almost a sigh, so full of unknown meaning that Remus looked at Sirius in question before he looked where Sirius was pointing. Sirius' expression had shifted, softened, his lips slightly parted, his eyes alive for the first time in days.

Remus turned, and his breath caught in his throat.

Ghosts were floating into the circle of stones from the southern side, dozens of them in an orderly procession. They were indistinct and blurred; at first Remus thought it was only the darkness, but as they neared the centre of the circle he saw that it was something else. The ghosts themselves were vague, mere outlines of human bodies, defined by their limbs, the roundness of their heads, the ghostly weapons they still carried, but little else. Here and there in the procession there was a brighter shape: the edge of tunic, the impression of eyes, a thatch of hair.

Several of them emerged from the darkness beyond the stones carrying a simple wooden bier, no more than a simple platform of logs, with no ghostly body atop it. The pallbearers were clearer than the other ghosts, but even they were indefinite, as if their edges were draining into the dawn.

"They're fading," Remus said suddenly, startling himself.

Beside him, Sirius nodded. "The man at the inn said they were very old, even older than the stones. Nobody knows who they were."

Remus thought about the ghosts at Hogwarts, silver and cheerful, dressed still in their death clothes and sitting down with the students at supper: Nearly Headless Nick's pompous good cheer, the Grey Lady's mournful face, the Bloody Baron's scowl.

"I didn't know they did that," he said, "even very old ghosts."

"Maybe--" Sirius' voice wavered. He swallowed and went on, "Maybe they start to fade when nobody remembers them anymore. I wonder -- I wonder if they know that, when they become ghosts."

"I don't know," Remus answered.

He had asked Nearly Headless Nick once, in his first year at Hogwarts, why some people became ghosts and others didn't. Nick had recognised in him a lonely boy still mourning his mother, and he had been kind, but in the end his words were little reassurance. Remus wondered why these people, men of a time so distant nobody remembered their names, had chosen to remain as ghosts. He looked at the empty bier they carried. Whomever it was they mourned, he had not stayed behind.

They watched as the ghosts set the bier on the ground and made it into a pyre. The silver flames devoured the silver wood quickly, and the procession broke apart. The ghosts did not leave the circle as they had entered; they scattered in all directions, floating almost aimlessly toward the stones. A few drifted toward Remus and Sirius. Their faces were soft, almost blank, but still mournful, and they made no noise as they passed.

Remus turned to watch a one man. His clearest feature was the curved bow he wore on his back, the bowstring still stretch across it. He wavered as he passed the boundary of the circle, and it seemed that he was caught in the breeze, tattered, stretched, translucent against the bright eastern sky. There was a moment -- a flash -- Remus squinted into the rising sun -- and the ghost was gone.

He turned back and shivered, hugging his arms around himself. Sirius looked at him and frowned, his expression of confusion melting into one of dismay. "You're freezing!" he cried, almost accusingly. "Why didn't you say something?"

Remus shrugged and tried to smile. "I'm fine," he said.

"No, you're not. Your lips are blue. Here." Sirius struggled out of his leather jacket and handed it to Remus; when Remus was too slow to take it he rolled his eyes and helped Remus put it on, as though aiding a very small child. "You should have -- well." He paused, uncertainly. "I guess -- I didn't tell you where we were going. Sorry." Sirius looked away, awkward as always with apologies, but his voice was normal again, familiar again.

Slipping his hand into Sirius', Remus leaned against him lightly, relaxing into the warmth of the jacket. "It's okay," he said.

Together, at the edge of the circle of stones, they watched as the last nameless ghosts faded into sunlit wisps, and vanished.


End file.
